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July 23, 2009

Michael New points out a valuable opportunity to help kids in need to benefit them now and in the future:

[T]he fact that children in foster care have high teen-pregnancy rates is unsurprising. A number of studies have shown that children from broken homes are more likely to engage in sexual activity at an earlier age. As such, it should not come as a shock that foster children engage in sexual activity more often and have higher pregnancy rates than their peers. Finding ways to reform the foster-care system so that children are placed in stable homes is a potential solution the author does not mention.

Furthermore, the fact that Planned Parenthood is gearing up to provide more sex education for foster children should concern the pro-life movement. The sex education provided by Planned Parenthood will doubtless be heavy on contraception and light on abstinence. Indeed, Planned Parenthood will doubtless have little interest encouraging reductions in the sexual activity which is causing the teen-pregnancy problem in the first place.

As such, this might be good opportunity for the pro-life movement, particularly crisis pregnancy centers, to specifically reach out to children in foster care. The pro-life movement receives a considerable amount of unjust criticism for failing to care about children after they are born. Reaching out to foster children would help to deflect this criticism. More importantly, greater involvement with foster children would have the short-term benefit of providing a valuable service to a vulnerable segment of the population. Furthermore, it would have the long-term benefit of instilling in foster children values that will allow them to someday form stable families on their own.

July 22, 2009

Lee: If you could ask an atheist just one (or two) questions, what would you ask?

Me: I would pose an ancient question, one that trades on the cosmological argument: “Why is something here rather than nothing here? Clearly, the physical universe is not eternal (Second law of thermodynamics, Big Bang cosmology). Either everything came from something outside the material universe, or everything came from nothing (Law of Excluded Middle). Which of those two is the most reasonable alternative? As an atheist, you seem to have opted for the latter. Why?"

July 21, 2009

Christianity Today reports on the hate crime legislation pending before Congress. While there is a debate over the implications of this bill for religious free speech, hate crime legislation is in principle antithetical to the great tradition of freedom of speech in our country.

The real reason for hate crime laws is not the defense of human beings from crime. There are already laws against that - and Matthew Shepard's murderers were successfully prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law in a state with no hate crimes law at the time. The real reason for the invention of hate crimes was a hard-left critique of conventional liberal justice and the emergence of special interest groups which need boutique legislation to raise funds for their large staffs and luxurious buildings.

He also quotes another writer pointing out that hate crimes punish motivation, not intent. Motivation has never been part of the crime, though it sometimes helps prove the crime. (Note that a motive never has to be proved to make the case for a crime because it's not part of the crime.) Intent is part of the crime. So hate crimes add a new element to the crime increasing the punishment. "Exactly," Sullivan points out. One of the reasons motivation has never been a part of the crime and punished is because our beliefs and affections are not accessible to the government, who prosecutes the crimes, and probing them as part of the crime is extremely intrusive into individual beliefs. Government doesn't tell us what to believe or punish us for what we believe because that has always been considered a dangerous slippery slope of government intrusion. Hate crime legislation introduces a new and unique precedent for government intervention into a sphere American law has always considered off limits.

Hate is wrong, it's immoral - against anyone for any reason. But our legal system has wisely recognized until now that not all morality should be legislated. And the affections of citizens, good or evil, is the purview of morality not law.

Hate crime legislation, then, turns out to be not really about hate, but politics. It's not hatred for the victim that is punished. That's covered under existing statutes. Rather, it's hatred for a protected class--African-Americans, Jews, homosexuals, etc.--that's punished under hate crime laws.

Such legislation makes two crimes out of one. The assault is a crime against the victim. The hate is a crime against the victim's group. Yet how does one make sense of a crime against a group that is a different crime from the one against the victim? Groups have no rights according to the Constitution.

July 20, 2009

Neil Armstrong can never be accused of overstatement in that declaration as he was the first man to set foot on the moon's surface. Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins accomplished a singular kind of first in mankind's history.

Whenever I think of that incredible event, I think of the thousands of people whose names we never learned who set their sights on the moon by the end of that decade - and actually accomplished it with incredible ingenuity and skill - and slide rules. I remember someone once comparing the technology we have on our desks today compared with what these engineers and technicians had to work with to build vehicles that could safely take men to the moon - and bring them home. The creativity and imagination it took to create the many thousands of components that went into that just amazes me.

And the courage of the men who were willing to put themselves on top of what was essentially a massive explosive and try to do something that had never been done before and had no guarantee of success. And their families who supported them, waited, and prayed for them to come home. It is a stunningly unique experience to have your father or husband 239,000 miles away.

I heard one of the astronauts say once that he figured they had at least a 30% chance of getting back okay. Those odds were fine with him.

I think of the skill, creativity, and courage God gifted these people with, even if they don't acknowledge Him. He's truly created mankind with unique capacities among His other creations. It is something to celebrate and praise Him for.

Before the lift-off, Aldrin was looking for a way to honor God's presence in the Apollo 11 space mission. He talked about this with his minister, Dean Woodruff of Webster Presbyterian Church in Houston.

When in their discussions the Christian sacrament of communion was mentioned, a plan emerged.

Two Sundays before the moon shot, Aldrin participated in a small, private communion service at Webster Presbyterian, after which Dean Woodruff broke off a corner of the communion bread and gave it to Aldrin along with a tiny chalice and some wine.

Aldrin sealed these in plastic packets and safely stowed them in his personal preference kit (each astronaut was allowed to take a few personal items with him).

July 20, 1969, was a Sunday. At 3:17 p.m. (Houston time) the Eagle touched down.Aldrin took out the communion elements from their flight packets and put them on a small table in front of the abort guidance-system computer. Then he called Houston, and asked for a few moments of silence.

In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, he poured the wine, watching it curl gracefully up the side of the chalice.

From a slip of paper he read the biblical passage, "I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing" (John 15:5, Revised Standard Version).

July 17, 2009

Robert and Frances Belote must be incredible people. When a gunman held them hostage in their home, they turned it into a witnessing opportunity and prayed for him.

Frances Belote, 82, watched as the stranger cut a phone cord and used it to tie her 83-year-old husband's hands behind his back. The couple's lazy Friday afternoon on their quiet dead-end street in Leesburg had shattered, and the Belotes feared that the agitated intruder might be the last person they ever saw."I said to myself, 'This is the end. This is it,' " Frances said yesterday. "But God was here. We felt his presence, and it gave us peace, and we were able to be calm."They spent the next nine hours as hostages, held in their bathroom by a gunman who police said had reached the end of a crime spree....

They said Spencer seemed like a good person, deep down, whose life had gone awry, someone who probably never intended to hurt them and simply happened upon their home while seeking a way to escape police."I sensed good feelings from him, that he could be a good person," Frances said. "I was praying for him the whole time."...

At one point, Spencer appeared with three rings in his palm, rings he took from a box on top of a bedroom dresser. Frances saw that they were her engagement ring, her wedding band and an onyx ring celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary. After Spencer remarked that the rings were pretty, she looked him in the eye and calmly told him that those rings are sacred to her and that he couldn't take them."I told him to put them back," she said. "And he did. He put them back in the box."

In a television interview, Mrs. Belote said she ask Spencer if he knew Jesus. He said he had when he was young, but that Jesus had left him. Mrs. Belote told him that Jesus would never leave him, but that he'd left God and could be forgiven.

The stand-off with the SWAT team outside ultimately ended peacefully, in part the police say, because of the Belotes' incredible composure and the rapport they developped with Spencer. Hopefully, they planted a seed the Holy Spirit will bring to fruit in Spencer's life. God's grace is amazing.

July 16, 2009

The unborn have memories, according to medical researchers who used sound and vibration stimulation, combined with sonography, to reveal that the human fetus displays short-term memory from at least 30 weeks gestation - or about two months before they are born.

"In addition, results indicated that 34-week-old fetuses are able to store information and retrieve it four weeks later," said the research, which was released Wednesday.

Scientists from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Maastricht University Medical Centre and the University Medical Centre St. Radboud, both in the Netherlands, based their findings on a study of 100 healthy pregnant women and their fetuses with the help of some gentle but precise sensory stimulation.

I know one thing I did 40 years ago today: I watched the launch of Apollo 11 for its mission to the moon where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would walk on its surface for the first time, while Michael Collins orbited the moon.

My dad always woke us up if there was an early launch or gathered us around the television to watch the launches. He was fascinated and awed at these accomplishments. This was a man who'd been born in a sod house on the plains, was 8 years old when Charles Lindburgh crossed the Atlantic, and had an unfulfilled wish to learn to pilot a plane. He'd witnessed the incredible progress of flight over half a decade, from frail biplanes to rocket ships to the moon. It was science fiction playing out in real life and he relished every second of it. A picture of the three Apollo 11 astronauts hung in our den.

When we grow up with these things or live with them long enough we tend to lose the sense of the awesome accomplishment space flight was. Indeed, the public's interest had already waned by the following spring when few followed Apollo 13 until there was a problem. It's hard to recapture that sense of awe 40 years later. But I think of my dad, and I can feel it again. I thank God for the wondrous capacities He's given mankind to reach and achieve such feats. And I pray we would better use our capacities for His glory and good.

I had dinner with these guys right after Richard Sternberg critiqued evolution's poster child, whale evolution. Sternberg has a Ph.D in molecular evolution and another Ph.D in systems science (theoretical biology) so I have to admit that some of it went over my head. But a lot of what we’re learning is meant to encourage young scientists at the conference to pursue rigorous scientific careers in intelligent design theory rather than teaching them every bit of scientific detail to every argument presented (But don't get me wrong, there's plenty of scientific detail being discussed here).